President Obama’s speech from Kabul triggers a memory of a visit there 10 years ago.

by Kevin Lamarque/Pool/Getty Images.

Before the cataclysm of 9/11, the first and last American president to visit Afghanistan was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who won the White House 60 years ago in part on the strength of his cryptic pledge to “go to Korea” after the election, which meant “get out of it.” All these years later, American troops are still in Korea, of course—a reality I could not help pondering when I heard President Obama’s speech from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan this week.

Obama outlined the planned withdrawal of most American troops from Afghanistan over the next two years, but also announced “shared commitments” that will keep some American forces working in the country on counterterrorism and training of Afghan forces until at least 2024. So one Afghan war is ending, but another has yet to begin. Just how many troops will stay, for how long—and whether that will be enough to keep Afghanistan from slipping back into chaos—are profoundly unanswered questions.

One Afghan war is ending, but another has yet to begin.

From the beginning of his presidential campaign, Obama pointed to Afghanistan as the good war, the one that mattered, in contrast to the adventure in Iraq, which he had long opposed as “dumb.” As president, he has been forced to deliver on that rhetoric, sending a surge of troops there in 2009, and doubling down on the American commitment. Now, with domestic political patience worn thin in both parties in an election year, those troops will be coming home.

Speaking in what he called the “pre-dawn darkness” of Afghanistan to a dinnertime television audience back home, Obama acknowledged what everyone knows: that to build an Afghanistan “in America’s image, or to eradicate every vestige of the Taliban,” would take many more years, lives, and dollars than Americans are willing to commit. He said the paramount goal is “to destroy al-Qaeda, and we are on a path to do exactly that.” That may or may not be so, but the limited American appetite for prolonging the fight was summed up by Obama’s opponent Mitt Romney, who confined himself to saying that he was “pleased” with the president’s trip.

Afghanistan has been the graveyard of foreign imperial adventurers for centuries, and a suicide bomb in Kabul just hours after Obama’s speech showed the enduring instability in the country. I could not help thinking of my own lone visit there, just 10 years ago, with Colin Powell, who became the highest-ranking American official to set foot on Afghan soil since Henry Kissinger in 1973. At that point, the U.S. diplomatic team was living mostly in an underground bunker, and the dust-covered American Embassy compound had been shuttered since 1989. Powell scheduled a joint news conference with Hamid Karzai, then as now the country’s president, and just as it was about to begin, all the lights failed in the presidential palace, an apt metaphor for the shaky conditions on the ground.

Obama concluded his brief speech with a passage that deliberately echoed Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address. “With faith in each other and our eyes fixed on the future, let us finish the work at hand and forge a just and lasting peace.” Whether that is really possible in Afghanistan remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: after nearly three and a half years in the White House, Obama himself bears the visible Lincolnesque scars of war. The first thing my 12-year-old daughter noticed when he came on our TV screen was not the flag or the armored vehicles parked behind him, but all the gray in his hair.